Adviser: GOP candidate was unaware of N.C. fraud
Consultant calls accusations of scam shocking
RALEIGH, N.C. — A political consultant for Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris testified under oath Tuesday that he was shocked by testimony accusing a campaign operative of directing an illegal scheme to collect, forge, fill out and turn in mail-in ballots.
Andy Yates, who leads a North Carolina political consulting firm called Red Dome Group, emphatically denied any knowledge of the alleged tactics of Leslie McCrae Dowless, a political operative from rural Bladen County. Dowless is at the center of an election-fraud investigation unfolding at an evidentiary hearing in Raleigh this week.
Yates also said he’d seen no evidence that Harris, a Baptist minister, knew of the alleged fraud.
“If I would have known that, it would have been over at that moment,” Yates told state election officials. “I never had any indication. Never had the first suspicion.”
On Monday, witnesses and state elections officials accused Dowless of directing workers to collect absentee ballots from voters, a felony in North Carolina. They said Dowless and his employees in some cases forged voter and witness signatures and filled out blank or incomplete ballots — and then tried to cover their tracks and obstruct the ongoing state investigation. It’s unclear exactly how many actual ballots Dowless or his associates turned in. Harris holds a 905-vote lead over his opponent.
Yates was the star witness on the second day of testimony before the State Board of Elections, which is hearing evidence this week to decide whether a suspected ballot-tampering scheme tainted the outcome of the 9th Congressional District race between Harris and Democrat Dan McCready. The election has been in limbo since November and is the last congressional race in the country to be decided. The board could certify the results or could vote to hold a new election.
Tuesday’s testimony raised the prospect that the board’s decision could turn partly on whether Harris and other Republican leaders should have known about the fraud — and whether that casts doubt on the overall integrity of the votes.
The board declined to certify the election results in November after allegations emerged that election fraud may have tainted the race. McCready has called for a new election, while Harris has repeatedly declined knowledge of any election fraud and has demanded that his victory be certified. The district stretches along the South Carolina border from Charlotte to rural eastern North Carolina.
Yates described Dowless as a well-organized and curious operative whose job included general get-out-thevote tasks, such as staffing local parades and festivals, as well as running Harris’s absentee-ballot program. Dowless called Yates and Harris many times a week to talk about his progress, Yates said.
“He was always interested in the numbers to do with everything about the campaign,” Yates said. “He was a political junkie and wanted to know what was going on.”
But Yates said he was given no reason to suspect misconduct by Dowless during last year’s primary or general election, noting that Dowless had made clear to him that he understood the law regarding absentee-ballot voting in North Carolina.
“Mr. Dowless told me that he knew that it was illegal to collect ballots, that he told his workers that it was illegal, that they never touched ballots,” Yates testified.
Board staff, as well as McCready’s lawyer, Marc Elias, also raised the question of whether campaign officials should have known about the alleged fraud given multiple red flags about Dowless dating back to 2016.
Yates admitted, for instance, that he was aware of the anomalous results that Dowless helped secure for Todd Johnson, an unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate who won all but four absentee ballots in Bladen County in the 2016 primary.
In addition to Yates, the board heard testimony from a poll worker in Bladen County who said early-voting results were illegally revealed on the Saturday before the November election — potentially giving campaigns a strategic advantage in the final days of the race.
The board heard no evidence connecting the release of those results to the Harris campaign, but officials could conclude the activity tainted the election anyway.
The poll worker, Bladen County resident Agnes Willis, said she “didn’t feel right” about seeing another poll worker examine the results tally from the county’s early-voting machine.